Kill Hole is seen by some critics as a Native American response to Albert Camus's The Plague (1948), Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1925), Franz Kafka's The Trial (1937), and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). All of these are psychological works of literature filled with symbols and som etimes conflicting themes. Highwater himself says that he is "interested in the subterranean streams that flow beneath the surface of things: dreams, intuition, the irrational, spiritual, and visionary impulses that stir our imaginations ... I have always preferred the night and the shadow side of existence." He goes on to express his interest in the "myth and personal" and to try, in his works, to "describe the fragile place where the inner and outer worlds meet."

There can be no doubting the ties between Kill Hole and Kafka's The Trial since, with the exception of a Native American name, the first...